The Gentlemen's Fight Club (Credit: Mei-Yan Chan)
There were eleven men inside the Palo Alto branch of Patxi's pizza parlor and Peter Andrada knew how to take all of them out. Some would be easy, simple smacks to the back of their necks and thighs, others might take more maneuvering. He might need to use a chair as a weapon. “These shatter easily,” he says, pointing to the wooden chairs tucked neatly under the wipe clean tabletop.
Andrada’s not under attack, he just likes to have a sense of his options in any given situation. It’s instinctive. “If someone catches my eye, I don’t let go,” he says. Andrada’s medium height, but densely muscled, with an engaging smile and short brown hair. But he’s not an undercover ninja or law enforcement; he’s an IT Manager for a Silicon Valley Internet Security company. The most dramatic thing that could happen to him at work is carpal tunnel from overusing his keyboard.
But he’s also a trained warrior, skilled in judo, wrestling and Filipino Martial arts. And for a number of years he was a regular member of Silicon Valley Fight Club, a secret haven where stressed out engineers worked out their angst by smashing each other over the heads with keyboards, dulled blades and sticks.
The so-called “nerd fight club” started drawing global attention in 2006; something about the dichotomy of geek tropes combined with a Brad Pitt-esque underworld connected with people. Reporters from Germany, the UK and Australia headed down to the Valley to learn more about the self-named Gentlemen’s Fight Club. The concept seemed ludicrous; what did code monkeys know about grappling?
But the reality was far different; the fights were serious events; no punches pulled and anything goes. The fact that your opponent works at
Andrada discovered the Gentlemen's Fight Club in 2006, through an anonymous post on an MMA forum. He’d just moved to San Francisco and was looking for a way to stay in shape. At first, he thought the idea was stupid. “I lampooned it,” he says. “Everyone’s a keyboard warrior on the internet.” But he watched some of their videos and he changed his mind. The fights he saw were raw and real, and he was drawn to them. He wanted to join — but they weren’t so keen. “I was told they don’t accept outsiders,” he says. To convince them, he met Gints Klimanis, the creator of the club in
The Origins of the Gentlemen’s Fight Club
Gints Klimanis is broad-shouldered and tall, with kind brown eyes covered by slim framed glasses, and callused hands. He founded the Gentlemen’s Fight Club in 1996 as a way to blow off steam and get some physical exercise. Klimanis is an engineer, and has worked at Apple, Nest and Leapfrog— he’s now at audio startup, Doppler Labs.
“In Silicon Valley we have the highest concentration of aggressive people in the United States. And it’s a place where all life has been reduced to working in a cubicle, and then after work going out to have a Merlot,” he says in Uppercut, a fight club documentary released in 2011. “I’m kind of looking for something a little more primitive, a little more basic, something that appeals to the essential nature of a man."
But the intense media attention baffled him. “We couldn't believe there could be so much interest in a story about office workers fighting for fun with a strong motivation to watch their own action afterwards,” he told me.
The setup was always the same. Every two weeks or so men would gather in Klimanis’ customized garage, for bouts that lasted for hours. The walls were lined with white plywood, — ‘good to bounce off’-- and many of the weapons used were sourced from local stores. We’re talking frying pans, tennis rackets, dustbusters, toilet seats, plungers, cookie sheets, and magazines rolled around brass rods. And the now infamous old-school keyboards that fighters would whack each other with.
“The keyboard represents our mundane lives and signifies what we hate the most,” software tester and fighter Ryoga Vee told ESPN. Vee later went on to participate in four American Ninja Warrior challenges. He still works in Silicon Valley.
“The press focuses more on the keyboard fights,” Klimanis says. “They are more tiring but less dangerous than anything else you'll see.”
The only rule of Gentlemen’s Fight Club was that if it’s your first time — you fight.
Many of the bouts are taped, and once the sweat and blood was wiped away, the club would relax with some beers and replay their matches, commenting on their performance. There was a brotherhood to it, the communal feeling of having created a bond through physical exertion.
"You get to be a superhero for a night," Klimanis said. "We have to go to work every day. We're constantly told to buy things we don't need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do."
This is an attitude that Professor Jonathan Gottschall understands. “Men fight for many reasons,” he says, “but foremost are honor and respect.” Gottschall, author of The Professor In The Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch, spent two years training as an MMA fighter to understand the psychological reasons men engage in violent activity.
“What you do in a fight is learn how to be brave,” he explains. “Above all else, a fighter is someone who’s got courage, who’s dead game in a fight. Most guys don’t come into the world that way. You learn to be brave through that process of getting your fear and timidity beaten out of you night after night after night.”
But like any club or group, there were peaks and lows at fight club. A number of people left; they relocated for work, they had other demands on their times, they didn’t want to get injured anymore.
But this didn’t mean the clandestine club closed down. A core number of members kept coming back, and the club evolved into a new beast — still focused on fighting and camaraderie, but now with a higher skill level and seriousness.
The Second Wave Of Fight Club
This is about the time that Peter Andrada showed up."There were two phases to the fight club,” he says. “I was there for the second wave of fight club, it had a high point and a resurgence.” He says change in any group is natural; priorities alter and it’s a recreational activity, not a mandated one.
Andrada fights with full backing from his wife, who he met when teaching a self-defense class at her sorority. “She hates weak men,” he says. “She says, whine and you’re done!” Unlike many other attendees, Andrada has been involved in organized fighting for a number of years, from playing with wooden swords as a boy to being on the judo and wrestling team in high school.
We’re still in the pizza parlor; he’s drinking a beer and I’m having a Diet Coke. “I couldn’t drink this if I was in the MMA,” he says. A large backpack sits next to him. “This was recently filled with bricks as I climbed a mountain,” he told me — one of his new passions is GoRuck, an intense endurance training event run by veterans. Think of it as Tough Mudder on steroids — and with real sergeants.
Today there were no bricks. Instead the bag was filled with a number of weapons. Andrada furtively placed them on the table, moving aside his deep dish slice to make room. First, I see his helmet, a meshed fencing mask with eyes drawn on to give it a smiley green alien appearance.
Andrada wears this at the fight club. “We’re about minimum gear but everyone wears helmets,” he explains. “We’re professional fathers, coders, and so on — we can’t be blinded.” The sides are covered with duct tape, and certain places have deep ridges. That’s where he took a blow to the head — a bat caved the mask in.
“Every time I see my optometrist he says, ‘you are at risk of a detached retina and could go blind!” he tells me. “He doesn’t realize I wear the mask.” With a prescription of -11 in his glasses, Andrada can’t function without spectacles.
Next he takes out a large Escrima stick, a Filipino weapon. It’s solid and heavy — “It hits like a bat!” he says. It’s covered in faded stickers that his children placed there. Then there’s a combat axe, made of some type of thick plastic. The blades plastic and dull — but the weight of it would scare me if someone was thrusting it at me. Finally, I hold a dull knife, the blade as long as my face. “Training blade” has been inscribed on it with a Sharpie. “That’s so I can take it through airports,” Andrada says. I heft it thoughtfully — and get a few odd looks from the families on their lunch. We quickly put it away.
Andrada thinks fighting is a normal part of male life. “We’re made to fight and make more of us, period,” he says. “Living under fluorescent lights and sitting on cushy seats - that’s so fabricated.” For him, it’s part of being present in the moment, not multitasking like he has to at work. “You can't think about laundry with a stick coming at your head!”
This isn’t to say that Andrada’s always calm and collected. He tells me about one time he lost his cool.“This one guy was strangling me with a keyboard cord,” he says.”I got upset, and took my mask off, dropped the F-bomb and drop kicked my mask across the room.”
Technologist and engineer Charles Blanchard, 47, was a semi-regular attendee for a while. Blanchard says he likes sparring; the group regularly used Filipino style weapons and he says it’s hard to find sparring partners. “The others guys there all train,” he says, “So you’re up against people with some degree of skill.” For Blanchard, fighting is about a mix of things; the brotherhood of being a group, the adrenaline when his heart pumps and a stick flies at his head, and the confidence of watching his skills grow and seeing himself improve.
Today he’s an infrequent attendee — he lives to far away, he says. But there’s also not really anywhere to go.
After the club moved out of Klimanis’ garage, it had no permanent home, and started being held infrequently, at different members houses. “The last fellow that generously hosted was out of town for half the year. So the decline was due more to a loss of the space than anything else,” Klimanis says.
“A comet has passed,” Andrada says. “We haven’t met in that garage for four years now.”
“The last few years were the best as we had really moved into more dangerous types of fight,” Klimanis added. These included metal chain fights and tougher weapons — people bringing it, hard.
But the lack of regular sessions meant members started looking elsewhere for their release, and as it happens, there was one organization that seemed a perfect fit.
For those unfamiliar with the term Dog Brothers, it refers to gatherings of fighters that spar using Filipino weapons; their most common combat form is stickfighting. Their website describes them as “sweaty, smelly psychopaths with sticks” and they were refused entry to UFC with the following note:
“It is with great reluctance that we must tell you stickfighting, such as your group has pioneered in the USA, is just too extreme for the UFC at this time. We have the utmost respect for your group’s skill and fighting spirit.”
This doesn’t deter Andrada.
“We moved onto the big leagues, the Dog Brothers!” he says. “The Dog Brothers was a natural progression!”
Andrada was introduced by Klimanis who had been involved with them for years. In Dog Brother world you work your way up the different stages — it’s far more organized than the basement brawls. But it’s also more violent, and it’s where most of Andrada’s concussions (major and minor) have happened.
Andrada's not a full Dog Brother yet — he needs to fight more to climb up the chain, but he’s higher up the rankings because of Klimanis, who’s considered a legend in the Dog Brothers world. Some consider his garage fights as tougher than Dog Brothers — less rules involved. Klimanis is a full brother and he goes by Baltic Dog.
Generally, to join the pack a potential Dog Brother needs to be a tribe member This is achieved by fighting at the gathering; some public, some members only. The levels are Dog, Candidate and Full Brother— a number of gatherings and skill levels take you through each stage. Because of Klimanis’ recommendation, Andrada was able to skip the ‘Dog’ stage.
Andrada’s ‘Candidate Dungeon Dog,” — his goal is to make full Dog Brother status soon. In September he meets for the Gathering of the Dogs and fights his next trials.
To train Andrada works out at home; he has a tire slung from a beam and practices his footwork. He plays Ice-T, Pantera and Tool to keep focused — his favorite songs include New Jack Hustler and Mouth of War. Right jab, left jab, side step.
Blanchard went the unusual route of being a Dog Brothers member prior to Klimanis’ fight club. He says he started working out with them in Houston, and he got the stick fighting bug. So far his injuries are minor, a chipped tooth from a knee to the mouth, and an “almost” concussion from a stick to the head. “But I’m not fighting all the time,” he says.
Injuries aren’t unusual at the Dog Brothers but retaliation is — their guidelines specifically state:
Plus, many groups make participants sign release waivers; which you’d never find at Klimanis’ garage.
At one Dog Brothers fight, Andrada tells me that they used stun guns — the type you jam into someone’s arm to shock them. “I was in extreme pain, my arm went numb,” he says, smiling. He’s excited to be going back soon.
The Future Of Fight club
In some ways this story has demonstrated that the Silicon Valley fight club has no future; it’s been mostly disbanded and occasional meetups are more about friends getting together than any structured event. At first contact Klimanis was dismissive, saying, “I no longer have an event for you to write a story about.” He’s nearing 50, and it’s understandable that he has other priorities.
However, the fable of fight club has also shown how its members have evolved; they’re the physical embodiment of the next-gen iPhone, sleeker, faster, more sophisticated. Andrada knows he can’t fight forever and sees his role in future transforming into a mentor or coach for baby Dog Brothers.“I’m built for fights, but I do it for the brotherhood,” he says. “I like the hugs afterwards.” He’s also heavily invested in GoRuck, and these create a balance in his life.
And no matter where he ends up, he'll always have his memories of fight club. “In the garage we had legends,” muses Andrada, his eyes bright.
